Mocambo shall be missed
Mocambo had the kind of lighting that forgave sins and encouraged fresh ones. Red leather booths curved around the room like conspirators leaning inward. Waiters in starched white jackets floated past with devilled crab and whisky sours, carrying themselves with the solemnity of the fallen elite of Kolkata.
I had come here to meet a woman. Glacia Bose. Odd name for a North Kolkata heiress with ancestral property with crumbling marble corridors, and family portraits that probably watched servants die during the Raj. But the name made sense once you learned about her father. The man had led one of India's largest clandestine Arctic expeditions during the last years of the Cold War and returned alive, which in espionage circles qualified him as either brilliant or compromised. Possibly both.
She arrived twenty minutes late and still managed to make the room feel as if it had been waiting for her permission to continue. Dark green silk sari. Hair pinned carelessly.
I met her because I was after the secrets her father had hidden. But now, sitting across from her in the fading amber glow of Mocambo, listening to rain drag itself across Park Street, I think the secrets can wait.